Overview

The following are frequently asked questions about the platform.

What is HPC? - or - What is a Super Computer?

The term high-performance computing (HPC) refers to any computational activity requiring more than a single computer to execute a task. Supercomputers and computer clusters are used to solve advanced computation problems.

How many cores does the Super Computer have? (Storage, RAM...)

48 compute nodes at 12 cores each = 576 cores
48 compute nodes at 64GB of RAM each = 768GB or roughly 3/4 of TB
48 compute nodes at 500GB local storage each = 23 TB
108 TB of GPFS storage. General Parallel File System, now called Spectrum Scale, is a high-performance clustered file system developed by IBM.

How fast is it?

10 TFlops as reported by LINPACK. LINPACK is the benchmarking software used to rate and rank supercomputers.
The network for intra-node communication is based on Infiniband and is rated for 56Gbits/second.
Comparison: A CPU currently found in some gaming PCs is the Intel I7 3930K which normally runs in the 3GHz range overclocked to 5GHz will net about 100 GFlops.
Florida Poly's Supercomputer is getting 10TFlops without overclocking and with plenty of room to grow in capacity and speed.

Who made it?

This HPC platform was made by IBM. The same people who made Watson the Jeopardy playing Super Computer!

What is it for? - or - What can it be used for?

The platform is very flexible and can be used for a number of things modeling and simulation mathematics and chemistry to assisting in video rendering or "big-data".

What Operating System (OS) does it use?

What else is in the racks?

In addition to the HPC cluster, Florida Poly has a Virtualization suite.
Florida Poly is currently running VMware's vSphere 5.5 update 1
Storage for the suite consists of 21 TB SAS and 2 TB of SSD
Hypervisors and storage are connected via 10GB links